Monday, February 22, 2010

In our efforts to get Linux 64 as much as an official platform as our other major platforms we have undertaking for the last few weeks adding unit tests to it.

The first step has been to run codesighs for Linux 64 and this required adding some entries to the graph server DB. This turned the first few builds red but it should be back to normal with the new builds.

The next step will be to add puppet to our current production Linux 64 slaves which we will announce ahead of time.

There are many more things to come but these two are the immediate ones that you should be aware of.

For more details check out this bug:
"Bug 520722 - run unittests on linux64"

Thursday, February 18, 2010

I started two weeks ago to do the 3.5.8 release for Firefox and this is the first official release that I have done.
It has been a great experience and the work that my coworkers have done has made it possible to be this smooth (there is room for improvements).

The process that I had to go through (simplified) is the following:

Week 1

Prepare some patches to bump the version and be ready for the official "go"

Trigger the builds. check that every builder that was triggered it completed

Start signing the windows builds and verify signatures

Add product to Socorro/Crash-stats

Week 2

Create major update

Push the updates to the beta channel

Week 3

Add bouncer entries

Request virus check

Push the builds to the mirrors

Create xulrunner builds

Push the updates live

Add final release symlink

Obviously this is a much simplified view of what it is involved but it gives a good idea and a time breakdown. Important to note that this is when a release does not require re-spins and it is not a fire-drill release.

I am glad it all worked out well and next time I will expect to commit less mistakes.

Thursday, February 04, 2010

We have turned off the WinCE builds in our release automation. This will give us back some of our CPU time for others builds.
Disabling these jobs is just as switching off the lights of a room, and therefore, it can be easily reversed.

NOTE: At first I had some problems with python 2.6 which comes by default. If by any chance you need to switch to python 2.5 I recommend you to use the following command rather than trying to build it yourself (python 2.5 doesn't easily build on snow leopard and it is not planned to port the fix)